


Avatar: the legend of Finn

by MarauderCracker



Category: Avatar (TV), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Avatar & Benders Setting, Avatar Finn, But also it's 2k long so..., Gen, More of a world-building intro than a proper fic?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-08
Updated: 2016-02-08
Packaged: 2018-05-18 23:52:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5948034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarauderCracker/pseuds/MarauderCracker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The next Avatar isn’t born in the Temples.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Avatar: the legend of Finn

**Author's Note:**

> This is not exactly a fanfiction but it's not exactly a "headcanon" either. If anyone wants to actually write 20k of this universe, you are more than welcome to.

The last Avatar died in the midst of war and, in the years between her death and the following reincarnation, the then growing Fire Order took control over the Fire Nation government and has been spreading across the globe. The next Avatar should be an air-bender, and so the Fire Order makes it their mission to destroy every last vestige of the Air Nation.  
Except the next Avatar isn’t born in the Temples. He’s the child of an woman who fell in love with a warrior from the Southern Water Tribe and left to live with him. The Avatar is born amidst snow and ice –and he would have grown up in a wonderful, loving home where he learned of the Water Tribe’s culture from his father and grandmother, and from the Air Monks’ traditions from her mother.  
Short after his birth though, his mother hears about the attacks to the Air Temples and leaves him with his father to go help her people, promising to come back. (When she does come back, she finds barely fifty survivors, a village in ruins, a grave with his husband’s name. The Southern Tribe is now a home for a hundred empty cradles, all the healthy children taken by the Fire Order.)  
They take him, along with all the other children of the village. The benders, every last one of them, are killed. But his grandmother had swore that his parents were both non-benders, that his mother had passed at birth. They rip his grandson from her hands and leave her to bury her son, but at least she knows he’ll live. He’ll live.  
He grows up without a name, without a family, without a nation. The Fire Order’s soldiers are nothing, dirt under the Fire-benders’ boots. He grows up hearing his officers talk of the Avatar (”It’s been almost thirty years since she died, the next should have appeared by now,” he hears one of his superiors say. “Maybe we killed it on the temples, Hux,” the other responds.) He grows up knowing that the Fire Empire can’t be stopped.

Leia Organa was the child of the old Earth Queen and the Fire Emperor, taken from the hands of her dying mother before her father even knew about her existence. She was given to a Northern Water Tribe’s Senator, while her brother was sent to a tiny island where the Earth Kingdom and the Air Nomads occasionally did business.  
When her father died, Leia thought that the world would know peace again. Avatar Ahsoka had passed, and her brother Luke had set to find the new Avatar like the Air Monk Obi-Wan Kenobi had done before him. Luke was an earth-bender, like their mother. Was, Leia thinks, but Luke is still alive. Somewhere, he has to still be alive.  
Her father’s death hadn’t been the death of the Empire. Ten years of shaky peace hadn’t been enough, and now Leia leads the White Lotus Resistance. Luke has vanished, the Air Nation has been erased from the face of the Earth, the new Avatar is nowhere to be found.

Leia, the fire-bender of the Resistance, the spark of the Rebellion, sets her more trusted spy on a search for her brother. If anyone can find the Avatar, it will be Luke.

On the Jakku Desert at the skirts of the Earth Kingdom, a young sand-bender digs up the scraps of old Fire Nation air-crafts from the sand and sells them for meager rations of food at the nearest village. Hers is a lonely life, and she has to keep herself well-hidden. Benders are being hunted by the Fire Nation and, if anyone saw her moving even a grain of sand, she’d be surely sold out for a recompense by the bounty hunters that roam the village.  
She’d leave –go to the Ba Sing Se, make a living off carrying boxes or selling fish in the markets, never use her bending again. She’d leave, but she knows her parents will one day come back for her. They promised.  
So she keeps out of the bounty hunters and the occasional Fire Nation patrol’s way, and carries pieces of metal to sell at the village. Only when she’s walked well into the desert –well away from prying eyes– does she dare to sink her double-ended staff onto the sand and will it to move. The desert carries her home.

Poe Dameron’s mother was an air-bender. He didn’t inherit her gift, but he did wind up with her hunger for adventure and his stubborn refusal to accept injustice. His mother and his father met fighting the Fire Empire’s first attempt at world domination, and he grew up during the first and only decade of peace that the world has known in almost a century. When the Fire Nation broke the truce he wasn’t a teenager yet, but he enlisted in the Earth Kingdom’s army as soon as he was allowed to.  
By the time he learned that the Earth Kingdom wasn’t willing to truly take a stand against the Fire Order’s actions, he defected and joined the White Lotus.  
General Organa wears Earth Kingdom’s traditional clothes, and they remind him of his father. He received a medal for his courage, handed to him by the Earth King himself, but the monarchy’s honors don’t mean anything anymore. General Organa’s military jacket was devoid of medals. Poe is the son of an air-bender, a spy for the Resistance. If he were to be found on the Jakku Desert…  
Lor San Tekka hands him a golden locket with the signs of the four elements carved onto it, with a tiny piece of parchment hidden within. “Luke might be our only hope of finding the Avatar and restoring balance to the four elements,” he says, and Poe clutches the locket in his hands.  
Then Beebee-ate runs into the tent (they’re a winged lemur, the child of the winged lemur his mother got at the Air Temple she was raised in, but they were born with malformed wings and they are unable to fly) and, with a chirping cry, let Poe know that they’ve got company.  
Three Fire Order air-crafts are landing at the edge of the village and, before Poe can even get in his own plane, the Stormtroopers are already marching out. He sees their white metal armor, the flame-throwers on their hands. Among them is a tall figure in black –Kylo Ren, the fire-bender. His sword lights up with red, angry fire before he strikes Lor San Tekka down.  
Before he has a chance to start the engine, a flame-thrower catches the plane’s tail. (Before they grab him, he puts the locket in Beeebee-ate’s tiny hands and begs them to run. The lemur’s big eyes plead him not to leave him, but he has to.)

He doesn’t have a name or a family or a nation, but he has something. “You could be an officer,” Captain Phasma had told him once, and the thought had made him sick, but he’d pretended to be proud. Working to make the the Order and the Fire Nation more powerful is a Stormtrooper’s pride and he’s nothing more than a stormtrooper. He’s the gunpowder in the Order’s cannons, he’s– he’s unable to press the trigger of his flame-thrower. There is blood on his helmet and he’s clutching a friend’s death on shaky hands, there is blood on his eyes and he can’t pull the trigger.  
He feels like the air is expanding inside his lungs, he feels like he’s never taken a real breath in his entire life. He rips the bloody helmet off and he breathes, breathes, breathes. For a one light second he feels as if he could fly, but then Phasma is ordering to put his helmet back on and he’s painfully aware that his flame-thrower is still completely full of fuel, that his friend’s blood has dried on his helmet, that he will never be able to kill an innocent.  
There is a power pulsing inside him that he’s never felt before and he clings to it as he makes the decision, as he lies through his teeth and grabs the prisoner and tries to keep his breath steady as they walk down a hall of the zeppelin. The White Lotus spy has blood crusting on his face. He has dried blood on his helmet –he pulls it off.  
“This is a rescue,” he says, because he doesn’t know what else to say. The man’s eyes open wide, he almost smiles. “Are you with the Resistance?” the spy asks. He tries to rush through an explanation –he can’t put words to this will pushing him forward, he says “it’s the right thing to do” and the man is quicker. “You need a pilot.”  
“I need a pilot.”

The first time he airbends, he has a name. He still doesn’t have a family or a nation, but the wind moves to his will and pushes the sand away. The name is Finn and it was a gift from the pilot –from Poe– and he pushes the sand, desperate, hoping against all hope that a breath of the wind will uncover the man unconscious under the desert. But there is nothing –the plane swallowed down by a desert dragon, no body in sight. The wind digs up the pilot’s jacket from the sand and Finn holds onto it. He carries the pilot’s life in his hands, too. The wind tells him to head to the East.

East, in a village at the edges of the Jakku Desert, he’ll meet a girl called Rey who can make the sand move at her will and a tiny winged lemur who can’t fly. East, in the alleys of Ba Sing Se, Rey will help him to learn how to will the earth to shift. East, in a secret headquarter hidden in the jungle beyond the Earth Kingdom, he’ll meet a woman who’s lost everything and is still trying to pull the world back together. East, in an abandoned Air Temple near the Ecuador, he’ll meet a man without a hand who will teach Rey and him how to bend metal and listen to the whispers of the ground. 

East, at the heart of the Fire Nation, all the way to the other side of the world, Kylo Ren will learn that the Avatar is back.


End file.
